The Kon-Tiki Museum Thor Heyerdahl with his first wife, Liv Coucheron Torp, during their stay in French Polynesia. Restless and eager to see the world, he dropped out in 1936 and went to live in Polynesia with his new wife, Liv Coucheron Torp. But Heyerdahl’s academic career was short-lived. In pursuit of that interest, Heyerdahl enrolled in the University of Oslo to study zoology and geography in 1933. His mother, Alison, was the head of the Larvik area museums association and inspired her son’s interest in nature and animals. How Thor Heyerdahl Became An Adventurerīorn on October 6, 1914, in Larvik, Norway, Thor Heyerdahl developed a fascination with the world at a young age. And though Heyerdahl’s beliefs were largely dismissed in his day, some modern-day scholars see what he was seeing. In the end, Heyerdahl’s voyages didn’t prove anything definitive, but they did suggest that ancient people could have embarked on similar ones. Traveling by simple boat, he and his small team traversed thousands of nautical miles to demonstrate that such travel could have been possible in ancient times, too. Over 30 years, Heyerdahl completed several transoceanic voyages to prove that ancient people could have influenced each other.

Artifacts, language, and cultural activities like pyramid building in disparate cultures convinced Heyerdahl that ancient people might have interacted with one another across oceans. When Thor Heyerdahl looked at the ancient world, he saw patterns. Ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images Thor Heyerdahl with artifacts from Easter Island.1957.

Thor heyerdahl museum